Free Bad Brides by Rebecca Chance Page B

shaped lips curved in a smile of nostalgic amusement as she remembered the struggle it had been to find her daughter a suitable talent for that specific part of the
competition. When Brianna Jade had won Pork Queen at the Kewanee State Fair (prize: five hundred dollars, a pigskin jacket and the lead place on a tractor trailer in the parade), all the
contestants had been required to prepare a pork dish as part of the contest, and Brianna Jade’s Tater Tots casserole had been widely appreciated.
    Thank God for Mrs Lutz, our landlady, helping BJ with that pork casserole. Someone had to – I could never cook to save my life – and at least BJ did the gruntwork herself. I know
damn well that Barb Norkus, who came second and went on to win Watseka Corn Queen, didn’t do anything with her pork ’n’ beans but carry the casserole – her mom cooked it
all.
    But you couldn’t hand out your pork casserole to judges from the stage, nor could you even cook it as you travelled around the Midwest staying in the cheapest of cheap motels and living
off bulk-bought ramen noodles, yoghurt and take-out salads from Arby’s. And Brianna Jade couldn’t sing or dance, not well enough to compete with the other girls, that was for sure: most
of them had come off the kiddie pageant circuit and had been taking lessons since they were four. So Tamra had come up with a comic skit for her daughter, ‘Twenty Things You Didn’t Know
About the Pig’, complete with a slide show, and, after intensive coaching, BJ had managed to pull it off okay.
    Never enough to win, though. BJ was beautiful enough to place as a runner-up for the prize money to keep them going, but it wasn’t enough for the big time. And Tamra had never blamed her
for it. She had pushed her daughter into pageants to get them out of Kewanee, and it had worked.
    But Tamra had been getting more and more worried, waiting in vain for that big break that would happen for BJ, the competition she’d win, the nice rich guy who’d fall for her. People
would tell Tamra to take BJ to LA and try the acting circuit, but no way was BJ an actress: she only managed that comic monologue with Tamra coaching the hell out of her. And Tamra could easily
imagine what pretty girls who weren’t great actresses went through in Hollywood to get cast. She’d have taken a rusty old pickaxe to the balls of the first guy who asked her daughter to
get down on her knees at an audition.
    Tamra wasn’t a typical pageant mom, living through her daughter’s success, letting her own looks fade in order to channel everything into the younger version of herself, willing to
sacrifice her daughter’s own wishes ruthlessly on an altar bedecked with crowns and prize money. Tamra had firmly told the many people in Kewanee who’d pushed her to get her adorable
little five-year-old into kiddie pageants where they could stick it. Brianna Jade would have as normal a childhood as her mother could manage, though Tamra had to work long days at the feed store
and pull night shifts at the local bar, Hogs and Cobs, while she scrabbled to maintain a network of fellow moms who would watch Brianna Jade for her.
    No point asking her folks for help: she’d been thrown out of the house when she got knocked up by her boyfriend, Brian Schladdenhouffer, even though he’d swallowed hard, manned up
and proposed when he heard the news. And no point looking to the Schladdenhouffers either; they’d blamed her for everything, from ‘trapping’ their son (whose clumsy condom skills
had actually been to blame for the pregnancy) to pretty much causing his death in the combine-harvester accident because, according to them, he’d been so distracted by being trapped that he
had slipped and fallen from the machine during refuelling. Not a pleasant way to go.
    Well, screw them all, the Krantzes and the Schladdenhouffers both,
a sixteen-year-old Tamra Jean Krantz with a bellyful of baby had thought, setting her jaw firmly and